Red Clay Park
Red Clay Park
Kennett Square, Pennsylvania
Kennett Square, Pennsylvania is known for its vibrant main street, seasonal festivals, and high quality of life. However, the public realm lacks green space, accessibility, trails, and designated parks. Like so much of the public realm in the United States, the vehicle had bisected and limited daily life.
The vision for the Park is to remedy Kennett’s connectivity and accessibility in all respects—to the water, to one another, and to the larger region. This new creek-side Park reimagines a forgotten urban creek as a connective “Central Park” for the Kennett region, and the signature greenspace of a planned 14-mile regional greenway trail. It delivers agency to children, and places for everyone to come together in a truly Public Park setting.
A Vision Plan for 45-acres balances restoration and watershed management goals with the overriding need to create vibrant, inclusive, and inspiring places for people to learn about and love their environment.
Red Clay Park – the first phase of a necklace of parks—delivers priorities that were a result of extensive public engagement for programmatic priorities with the community.
Its design takes a threefold mandate: first, to restore and reforest a degraded creek environment, to the benefit of the watershed as a whole; second, to connect people with the amazing ecology in their own backyards; third, to deliver the fundamental amenities for multi-age community: trails, play, seating, lighting, and a vibrant ecological context.
A major focus of this small park and greenway project was to connect community to the water, and to deliver agency to the youth of Kennett Square—stitching together key civic destinations with ease and democratic access—schools, playgrounds, waterways, seating, cycling infrastructure and picnic grounds marry together in this new Park for the Borough.
Project timeline: 2019 - 2024
Client Team: Kennett Borough and Square Roots Collective
Project Type: Park | Garden | Greenway | Waterfront
Size: 1-Acre
Partners: Bowman, Biohabitats, Meliora
